First of all, consider that it the airline does not charge
people for changing their flight reservations it can almost certainly expect
that people will blow off their original flight times at the drop of a hat, and
still expect to be accommodated whenever they eventually make it to the
airport. I say that because people already behave this way, and many of them
will then become incensed upon being told that there will be a charge for
re-routing them. I can’t think of any other type of business in which customers
routinely order a product or service, then decide not to use it, and then
demand to receive either a replacement or a refund, despite the fact that the
vendor provided exactly what they ordered and had it ready at the agreed-upon
time and place. No retailer or craftsman would tolerate such behavior, and if
you did that at a restaurant you might succeed in getting your money refunded,
but you’d probably be banned from the establishment afterwards…
At the same time, as noted yesterday, any airline which
takes concrete steps to prevent this type of abuse – by only offering
non-refundable tickets, charging large fees for rebooking passengers or the
like – will quickly begin losing customers to other carriers that have less
draconian rules. And if the company raises fares in general to cover the cost
of operating flights with empty seats they are unlikely to retain any
passengers, at least in any of their lower fare categories. But while customers
will not tolerate higher fares, higher fees, or not being able to refund/rebook
tickets whenever they like, they generally will accept a (relatively) low
chance of being the unlucky souls bumped off an oversold flight – provided that
it remains a relatively low probability…
If we accept that these conditions are relatively fixed –
or, at least, that they are beyond the power of the airlines to change – then we
must ask what alternative these companies have in regards to overbooking their
flights. Losing all of their customers to the competition and going under is
not an acceptable option; neither is spending more running half-empty airplanes
than you can make on the airfares and simply going bankrupt. And having these
companies go under isn’t good for the rest of us, either. Quite apart from the
damage it would do to our economy if all of their employees are left without
jobs, all of their vendors lose their business, and all of the people who work
for those companies are left destitute, the more companies the go under the
fewer options that will be left on each flight route, and the less pressure
there will be on the few surviving airlines not to abuse their customers still
further…
Which brings me to the question: if overbooking flights is
the only way for an airline to stay in business, and if the failure of their company
will do harm to their stockholders, their employees, their vendors and their
stockholders, and eventually even to the customers of competing carriers, does
all of that harm outweigh the consequences of people occasionally being bumped
off of flights? No one is saying that people who have paid for transportation
at a specific time and place aren’t being materially damaged by not receiving
that service, or that there couldn’t eventually be some serious consequence of
someone being denied the passage they need. But given this choice of disasters,
is the inherent iniquity of being temporarily deprived of a service for which
you have paid actually bad enough to require the consequences? Or, to put it
another way, does the airline’s ethical responsibility to get its passengers to
their destinations as quickly and safely as possible outweigh their ethical
responsibility to their other stakeholders to provide jobs, drive the economy,
and provide modest return on investment?
It’s worth thinking about…
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